Bono invests in online storage start-up Dropbox

San Francisco
-
Dropbox, the web-based file hosting phenomenon, has yet another believer - Bono. In conjunction with band mate The Edge, Bono has made a substantial personal investment in Dropbox. The amount invested has not been disclosed.

The San Francisco-based company - and winner of the Best Overall Start-up award at last year’s Crunchies - offers users the ability to store their files in the ‘cloud,’ where they can be accessed from anywhere via web browsers or apps. The company has become tremendously popular over the past year. It was recently valued at $4 billion.

“Dropbox is excited to welcome Bono and The Edge as investors. We thank them for their support and look forward to great things ahead. Rock on!” tweeted the company this week. Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox, added on his Facebook page that he was “really excited to have Bono & The Edge on board :).”

Bono is Managing Director of Elevation Partners, a private equity firm focused on large-scale investments in innovative technology companies that are positioned for rapid growth and market leadership.

Just four years into its existence, Dropbox seems the perfect sort of company for Elevation Partners to sink some money into. Dropbox grew exponentially in 2011, quintupling its number of users from 2010 to more than 25 million. According to more recent stats, the user base for Dropbox now stands at 50 million.

Dropbox confirmed last year that it had raised $250 million in a fund-raising round led by venture capital firm Index Ventures and which featured several new investors, including Goldman Sachs.

Other notable previous investors in Dropbox include former Mozilla CEO John Lilly, SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg, and Facebook Director of Engineering Aditya Agarwal.